The Wealth of (Some) Nations

Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer

Paper $29.00ISBN: 9780745338859
Published
April 2019
For Sale in All Americas and the Caribbean except Canada

Cloth $99.00ISBN: 9780745338866
Published
April 2019
For Sale in All Americas and the Caribbean except Canada

In this provocative new study, Zak Cope makes the case that capitalism is empirically inseparable from imperialism, historically and today. Using a rigorous political economic framework, he lays bare the vast ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries through the mechanisms of monopoly rent, unequal exchange, and colonial tribute. The result is a polarized international class structure with a relatively rich Global North and an impoverished, exploited Global South.
Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions, and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised. The only way forward, Cope argues is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labor internationalism.

Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class

“This is simply the most significant book published on the political economy of imperialism in the twenty-first century, written by the foremost scholar of global imperialism today. Cope lays bare the fundamental structural contradiction in contemporary global capitalism: the pervasive class divisions which divide the Global North from South and are indelibly imprinted in the historical legacy of Western imperialism.”

For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://www.press.uchicago.edu